Narrative Design Tips
I recently had an acquaintance who is a game design student ask me about how she might start to expand her narrative design portfolio and what she should make sure to learn as she begins her journey.
Now, I certainly don’t have the definitive answers to this, but I had some ideas that I shared with her. And I figured it might not be a bad idea to share them with everyone.
These are just my opinions though, not the end-all-be-all of narrative design. If you have anything to add or think that I should expand on a topic, let me know in the comments.
Falun Mine, A digital painting inspired the works of Carl Larsson
Are narrative design courses worth taking? I already know how to write well and understand game design.
Yes, narrative design courses are a great place to start. I have been taking them since I started in this career path and still get something out of retaking or browsing through classes I’ve already taken.
“You need to read a book 6 to 9 times and not less than 3 times in order to memorize it. Our brains recall things in three’s because if something happens once we over look it, if it happens twice we call it a coincidence, when it happens three times we recognise it as a pattern and stays with us.”
— Published by Chewe Kalamata
I totally agree with Chewe. Reread and repeat. That is one of the key lessons you might learn going to graduate school. The first time you read something is just getting the surface level. When writing some of my published academic works, I read some of my source material 5 or 6 times before I felt like I fully understood all the concepts and could rework their content into my own arguments.
However, there is a caveat. Not all online courses are made equally. I have mostly taken courses for narrative design on edX and Coursera but not all were as good as the others. So, make sure you read the intro material to know who your instructors will be, and even start taking the free version of the course (if possible) before you pay for it.
Another key to this is applying for financial aid from the course website. Often they will waive the entire fee or greatly reduce it if you can properly explain your financial and life situation.
What should I include in my narrative writing portfolio?
When it comes to specific things you need to know how to write, cinematic scripts are important but not every project needs them. It just depends on the kind of game you’re working on. Dialogues are the thing I’ve focused on most as I come from a theater and short story writing background. Also, I just love when games have good dialogues, like with KOTOR, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect — all from Bioware, lol.
If you don’t have a lot of experience writing dialogue, it is good to start with something simple. Write a scene for a cutscene or a play to begin. Then take that scene and make branching dialogues from what you’ve written. You can do this right into a doc, or take it one step further and make a Twine game out of it. You’ve just got to start getting a feel for the rhythm of writing dialogues because they aren’t anything like how a conversation in real life goes.
Other great resources like articy:draft 3 are a great way to structure and organize your dialogues with the capability of adding variables and conditions.
But to write good dialogues you’ve got to know how to make good characters. There are lots of ways to build your characters, but I usually make a mood board with images of what they look like and their personality, then write a bio with those images in mind as it helps me stay grounded. This kind of bio will probably never be read by the player bit can help you convey to your teammates and the art department who they are.
Another step you can take is writing several different “throw-away” scenes in their voice or a monologue from their perspective. These kinds of exercises can both get you to know your character better and can give your collaborators an idea of who they are as well. It is paramount that everyone on a team is on the same page about who your characters are and agrees on their tone of voice and worldview.
Another thing that players might not see the first form of is lore. Writing lore for games can be fun or a chore, especially if your superiors don’t read it then ask for something completely different. That happened to me recently… I’d worked on a bunch of characters and lore for months then found out the CEO decided we were no longer making a fantasy game but a sci-fi one. Very annoying situation but that’s what happens sometimes, and you’ve just got to roll with it. That’s what it is to be a writer for games.
Lore is generally seen by the player in the form of found narrative. The codices, letters, and voice notes that you find in games all need to build the world of the game, immersing the player into it.
I love making lore. It has been a passion of mine for most of my life to make complex worlds and storylines. This is what led me to first making content for Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games, and ultimately what led me to video game narrative design. But not every narrative designer or game writer will be making tons of lore, as there are a host of other responsibilities that we take on.
Those are the big topics for narrative for me: dialogues, characters, and lore, but you might also need to write barks, provide marketing copy if they are a small studio, and most importantly of all be ready to change stuff. I’ve seen some great game writers get very disillusioned and upset with a project when their work isn’t used immediately and in the form they first wrote it. But as we work with words, which are comparatively cheap when they face expensive art assets and game mechanics, we, as narrative writers, have to be willing to change our story to fit what the other teams can make in the time allotted.
Overall, my advice to anyone just starting off is to focus on one part of narrative design at a time. I’d suggest making some short games with Twine or some other easy software to flex your abilities, join a game jam or two sp that you have collaborative experience, and stay positive even when things don’t work out just the way you imagined.
Can I ask what a bark is?
Whoops! I have been in this for a bit, so sometimes forget the weird jargon of narrative design. Barks are those short little lines you get from characters that don’t have interaction. Like when you run out of ammo and the player character says, “Damn! I’m going to need to find some bullets.” Or when you walk by an NPC and they say, “Nice day for fishing, ain’t it?” expecting no response from the player. They used to be a big part of the narrative design when games had less story to them. But now games have a lot more dialogue and other story elements, so they aren’t really the highlight anymore. But good barks can really enhance a game’s feel and immersion.
Should I include a little bit of everything in my narrative design portfolio to showcase what I am capable of?
Yes, definitely show that you can do the different roles, but I’d also say make sure to highlight your strengths and not spread yourself out too much. If you like writing dialogues and think you’ve got some great conversations to share but only have a short portion on lore creation, that is totally fine. You should show off most what you are already good at; hopefully, the studio will see that potential and be willing to foster your growth as you learn how to write other aspects of game narrative.
